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Mar 29, 2016

What can we do to address climate change and other big challenges to the balance of life on earth? We can do a lot when we remember that our shamanic skills allow us to engage effectively in issues that feel overwhelming and out of our reach. Whether our shamanic skills are just budding and basic or advanced and in full bloom, we can bring our shamanic skills to bear on a larger scale to address the needs right now on earth. This week, shaman and earth healer, Ana Larramendi, joins host, Christina Pratt, to share her work with the earth in clearing, restoration, and deep facilitation of a return to right relationship with the earth. Ana's Earth Tenders Apprenticeship is unparalleled in the training it offers practitioners in developing awareness and skills that are applicable to a broad range of situations requiring earth-healing interventions in our modern times.

This week's guest:Ana Larramendi

Ana H. Larramendi has spent her life weaving together her spirituality with nature skills to create a skill-set of tools for land healing and teaching students to detect and heal earth trauma. Of Spanish and Basque ancestry and born in Spain, Ana is a full-time shamanic teacher and healer, at The Hollow Bone, a private practice in Madison, Wisconsin. She offers a full range of shamanic healing forms, space clearing, and various land healing practices and offers a range of shamanic course work and her Earth Tenders Apprenticeship for more advanced practitioners.

Ana has been studying shamanic traditions since 1989 and is an international teacher of shamanic healing practices. She is a minister, public speaker, Vision Quest leader, wilderness enthusiast, ceremonialist, chef, translator and an initiated mesa carrier in the Inka tradition. Ana has studied extensively with teachers from many traditions including: Alberto Villoldo, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, Sandra Ingerman, Angeles Arrien, Betsy Bergstrom, Tom Cowan, Dr. Larry Peters, Marko Pogaĉnik, indigenous Alto Misayoqs of the Andes, and Weather Shamanism with Nan Moss and the late David Corbin. She also studied for 6 years with Tom Brown Jr. of the Tracker School, learning tracking, survival and wilderness awareness skills.

Ana has been a lecturer for the University of Wisconsin Medical School, as well as teacher and Peruvian guide for Madison Area Technical College. She is a founding member of the Society for Shamanic Practice and was a keynote presenter for their first annual conference in 2005. Ana's work has been published in The Journal of Shamanic Practice.

Mar 22, 2016

Hatred is a luxury we do not have. It costs too much, eventually destroying all that truly matters and leaving the soul lost as collateral damage. What can we do to reverse the rising tide of hatred in the United States? Using our shamanic skills we can draw on our helping spirits to support us in small, everyday acts to shift the story playing out around us. For the more experienced practitioner we can engage in large acts of ritual, healing, and ceremony that reach the very source of the hatred and focus the power of transformation there. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the small, subversive daily acts that allow each of us to engage hatred where we meet it and the larger shamanic acts needed to disengage today's hatred from the historic roots that nourish it. Large and small, it is work we must all engage in or we have learned nothing from history. Hatred ultimately costs us our souls.

Mar 21, 2016

I have been taking this class through Harvard edX on religious literacy and enjoying it very much. It's also been taking up a lot of my writing time, so in lieu of a blog post, I thought I'd post the Midterm I recently posted to the classroom. The assignment was to apply the cultural studies method to a contemporary article, relevant to my cultural context. I chose this article for analysis. The questions posed are in bold. It's a little brief, because there was a word limit. My first draft was about twice the length, but oh well.

1) Does the article represent the religion or religions in question as internally diverse?

Yes and no. The authors specify that the focus is biblical literalists, including "Evangelical and fundamentalist churches, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and other conservative sects." They distinguish these sects from "liberal, progressive Christian churches with a humanistic viewpoint, a focus on the present, and social justice."

There is no acknowledgment of diversity among Evangelical sects and LDS, and that not all are rigidly "conservative." For example, the authors claim that these groups "focus on the spiritual world as superior to the natural world." However, there are Evangelical movements with a strong focus on ecology and "stewardship" of the natural world.

Aside from the caveat about “liberal” sects, they are not represented in the article. There are no examples of benign or positive influence in other Christian sects. Yet, they make many generalizations about the destructiveness of Christianity and religion, writ large, rather than confining these assessments to these "conservative" Christian practices.

To say that some religious expressions are “more toxic than others” implies that they’re all at least somewhat toxic. This broader implication is not supported in the text. While there is acknowledgment of the internal diversity of Christianity, the authors do not present a balanced portrait of that diversity.

Mar 15, 2016

Feeling fear-whether real or imagined- initiates a variety of chemical responses in the body that support the needed physical response, either fight, flight, freeze, or focus. It is a natural response to specific or immediate danger to our physical well-being. But why do we feel paralyzing fear when there is no imminent danger? More importantly how do we work with fear, whether brought on by specific danger, a perceived psychological threat, or flashing back out of time in a PTSD induced response to life? Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the terrain of contemporary fears and how we can use our shamanic skills to address fear, to discern what the true source of a fear is, and to transform the patterns of fear that allow illusions to run our lives.

Mar 8, 2016

This week host and shaman, Christina Pratt, shares case studies of shamanic healing with people who found a path to health and freedom by engaging their four wisdom bodies. Shamanic skills allow us to develop and to work in all four wisdom bodies: the mind, the heart, the spirit, and the body simultaneously. When one wisdom body is out of balance, deficient, or dominant it can throw our whole experience of life out of alignment with our power and greater truth. Join us as we explore what it feels like to trap your processes in the dominance of one wisdom body, the distortion that creates, and how real people have used their shamanic skills to open to new wisdom and cut a direct path to health and well-being.

Mar 1, 2016

The Mental Wisdom Body is largely locked away in our inability to distinguish our self from our mind. We are more than our mind and until we can tap the "more" we cannot refine our mental wisdom body. Our guide to access the wisdom of the mental body is the Seer, or Visionary Self, who teaches us how to get out of our own way and allow the innate expression of our unique genius to rise to our awareness and unfold. The wisdom of the mental body teaches us the right use of the past, the discipline of non-judgment and the practice of self-reflection without blame or shame. Join us this week as host and shaman, Christina Pratt, explores how we begin to refine the mental wisdom body and train our brains to release the chokehold it has on our hearts and our deepest, most passionate vision for why we are here.

"Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven, or, to speak more exactly, in Egypt all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven have been transferred to earth below? Nay, it should rather be said that the whole Kosmos dwells in this our land as in its sanctuary." - from the Hermetica